We have definitely seen a streamlining of community investment objectives: We are focusing a lot of our efforts on employment and training initiatives and financial inclusion. This seems to be happening across the sector. As we invest more into these activities we need better ways of understanding their impact.

Investing for the future: We may find ourselves supporting, or even delivering, initiatives that a few years ago we may not have thought plausible. Quality neighbourhoods need good quality community infrastructure, judging how far we go with supporting these things – in terms of scale – will always be open to debate.

Being prudent: Approaches that are disproportionately expensive and resource intensive just can't and don't work. On the other hand, investing without evidence of impact is clearly untenable. The challenge is to find ways to capture data in low impact ways, but with sufficient quality to provide a basis for decision making and impact evaluation.

Community investment is something to celebrate: It is arguable that much of the last 10-15 years of housing provider community investment has been a mixture of pictures of kids with facepaint on swings in annual reports, and rather too many awards ceremonies. Community investment as something to celebrate, rather than something from which hard and evidenced outcomes were required.

Measuring impact: The challenge has got to be to come up with an effective but less costly way of measuring the impact of, not just our community investment activity, but our activity as a whole. We know the cost of everything but not always the value. It is important that we can demonstrate the difference our activity is making.

Ask yourself the same question three times:Why are we doing this? Why are we doing this? Why are we doing this?

Plan ahead: We have a key role to play but must be clear what that is, what the benefits to us and to our residents are and let others lead if we're not best placed

There are different ways of measuring social value: The value to the individual, the value to their family and community, the economic value to the government (lower benefit payments) and let's not forget benefits to the landlord (lower antisocial behaviour and higher satisfaction, for example). We try to measure all of these.

Carole Donnelly is director at Community 1st Projects and manager of 4Towers Tenant Management Organisation

Community enterprise:Housing associations could help set up and train the tenants to start up small community enterprises. Given all the changes and cut backs many centres and buildings could close. so what better way to show commitment than working jointly to retain the the community infrastructure.

Stay local: Most of the outstanding best practice examples of community investment are from landlords with very geographically confined areas.

Use partners: As the landlord we are not always best placed and have the confidence of our customers, so we work with the partners that have built up or could build up the relationships with our customers more easily.

Share best practice: There is a lot of excellent work we are all doing, but we can still work together better and share what we are doing to improve our effectiveness for the benefit of our customers and the wider community.

Positive signs: It's encouraging that there remains so much of a focus on community investment by housing associations despite squeezed resources for what are often considered to be 'non core' activities.

Encouraging social enterprise: We are currently looking at setting up a social enterprise pot of funds that will be available to our residents to apply to. It's about actively working with our residents in seeking ways in which we can support community-led initatives that get people out of their homes and working together to improve their neighbourhoods.

Local champions are vital in taking the temperature of the local community: As well as accessing groups that organisations might not be able to.

A loss for residents: Some housing providers have pursued a less community-driven growth strategy in recent years, which is a real loss for their residents. In a time of swingeing cuts and austerity, there is no better time to invest in our communities so that residents can access opportunities and support when they need it most.

Business positioning for housing associations will see community investment increasingly pivotal: With economic recovery drawn out, in some communities we'll need to be ready to provide the enterprising support.

Increasing satisfaction: We have re-measured 'satisfaction with neighbourhood as place to live' and shown clearly that community investment resulted in a 10% above average increase. We have also massively reduced turnover on big new developments.

Take a step back: We see more long-term success with projects that are set up and run by community groups themselves, and we can use our skills and resources to bring in additional investment and start up expertise. It's a challenging cultural change from rescuers to enablers, encouraging colleagues to think differently about how to do things to facilitate long term change.

Be smart: Investing in direct employment services where there is no match between local skills and jobs just won't work. You may need to work with the community to build skills and employability relevant to opportunities. To do this you need to know your communities.

You have to be strategic and pick what you can and cannot do: It is essential to know how much you've got to invest, to know that you can keep generating surpluses to invest, and also to know what impact you're having.

"Give someone a fish, they will eat for a day": Teach someone to fish, they will eat for lifetime. Give someone a grant to set up a youth diversionary fishing project, and you might need a team of statisticians to measure the social return on investment. Can't we just give them a fish instead? That's not my view – just my view of the challenge.